Judeochristianity at its finest

Lest you be deceived about the true nature of the Intellectual Dark Web:

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God”. Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?
- Bret Weinstein

What he's missing is that it is true.

And precisely what "darkest chapters" would those be? Just more shameless Judeochristian lies about history. It won't be long before we'll be informed that scrappy Judeochristians from the Bronx not only created Western civilization, but also invented gunpowder, discovered America, and defeated Hitler.

Predator complains about imitator

It's jaw-droppingly astonishing to see a US diplomat complain about anyone else debt-trapping less-developed countries:

A senior US diplomat launched a verbal barrage at Beijing’s economic presence in Pakistan, claiming the massive investment brought nothing but corruption and a legacy of debt. China hit back saying IMF loans were a worse burden.

A senior American diplomat in South and Central Asia mounted harsh criticism of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, an ambitious plan to turn Pakistan into a major trade route connecting China directly with the Arabian Sea. Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Assistant Secretary of State Alice Wells said the multibillion-dollar project, which China touts as a model of cooperation with other nations in its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, was riddled with corruption and only hurt the Pakistani people.

“Together with non-CPEC Chinese debt payment, China is going to take a growing toll on Pakistan’s economy, especially when the bulk of payment starts to come due in the next four to six years,” the US diplomat said. She added that a “lack of transparency” would boost the cost of the projects and result in an even heavier debt burden.

All China is doing is precisely what the USA, through the IMF, has been doing since 1945. Apparently it is bad to be in debt to Chinese bankers, but good to be in debt to US bankers.

A nonexistent invitation

Thomas Howard leaped to a completely erroneous conclusion subsequent to my invitation to Mr. Fuentes to debate a specific historical event of particular interest to him:

This must mean Nick the knife has finally and definitively turned down the "come join us at unauthorized tv" overtures. Considering his live viewership, nightly superchat support, and the fact he is taken as a serious threat by conservative Inc, this must be quite a blow to the ego. To the gamma, the sting of rejection is like the slow knife, the one that takes its time, which slips quietly between the bones, that's the knife that cuts the deepest.

Let me be perfectly clear about the relevant facts. Nick Fuentes was never invited to join Unauthorized.TV. Never. Out of about 85 established creators who have expressed varying degrees of interest in joining us at one time or another, precisely three have been invited to join UATV: Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown, Zammy the Giant Sheepadoodle, and Wranglerstar. All three accepted the invitation without hesitation.

I have spoken once to Mr. Fuentes, on May 8th, 2019, for about 20 minutes. We had a good and mutually respectful discussion, in which it soon became apparent to both of us that it did not make any sense for him to join Unauthorized, which is why he never asked to join it and I never invited him to do so. I further note that America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes has 68.9k YouTube subscribers, which is excellent considering that he had around 30k back in May when we spoke. That being said, by way of comparison, UATV's newest contributor, Wranglerstar, has 1.33M subscribers.

In summary, no one at Unauthorized cares even a fraction of an iota whether Mr. Fuentes wants to be on Unauthorized or not. We certainly wish Mr. Fuentes great success in his campaign against Conservatism Inc., but we neither need nor want him on our channel. Our egos, such as they are, remain intact and unaffected.

4GW in the USA

A military genius warns of what will happen if the Deep State gets its way:

As I have said many times, Fourth Generation war is at root a contest for legitimacy.  On one side is the state. On the other is a vast array of alternate primary loyalties: religion, race, tribe, gang, and locality, among others.  Around the world, the contest is going poorly for the state as a growing number of people shift their primary loyalty to one of the many alternatives, for which they are willing to fight.

Washington does not perceive it, absorbed as it is in its own struggles for power and money, but the same contest is going on in this country.  So far, to our great benefit, it has remained on the peripheries. Urban police know they are confronting it in the form of ethnically-based gangs, which are illegal business enterprises that fight.  But the mass of the American people appear still loyal to the state.

The appearance is, I think, deceptive.  On both the Left and the Right, doubts about the legitimacy of the federal government are growing.  Mostly, the doubts are about the legitimacy of the current President, although polls show public perception of Congress is also strongly negative.  There is no question many on the Left regard President Trump as illegitimate. Should a hard-Left figure such as Warren win in 2020, the Right will doubt her legitimacy.  But considering the current President illegitimate is different from thinking the state itself has lost its legitimacy.

Impeachment could change that.  President Trump’s supporters regard his election as proof their voices can be heard, that their interests will be considered in Washington.  They know that to virtually all Democrats and some Republicans, they are “unpersons”. Why? Because they are White, male, or non-feminist female, straight, and mostly Christian.  They are also struggling economically, which means they are not contributors to politicians’ campaigns. The coastal elites dismiss them as rubes and hicks inhabiting “flyover land”.  The Democratic Party, which has embraced the ideology of cultural Marxism, considers them all inherently evil “oppressors” fit only to kiss the feet of blacks, immigrants, gays, feminists, etc., PC’s sainted “victims” groups.

Again, should a Warren win in 2020, President Trump’s supporters will not consider her (or him) a legitimate President.  But if the unholy alliance between Democrats and the Deep State succeeds in driving President Trump from office through impeachment or some other means, that will be a very different story.  At that point, the message to President Trump’s supporters will be, “Your votes don’t matter, because even if you elect a President, we will drive him from office and reduce you to a silent serfdom.  You and your views are entitled to no representation. You are and will remain ‘unpersons.’”

At that point, in the vast electoral sea that is red America, the legitimacy of the system itself, i.e., the state, will be brought into serious question.  And when that happens, the chance of Fourth Generation war here on a large scale will rise dramatically. When you tell people they cannot achieve representation through ballots, they start to think about doing it with bullets.

The Deep State is playing an incredibly dangerous game here and has been for some time. The thing is, no matter how it turns out, they are not going to win. Messrs. Van Creveld and Lind seldom see eye to eye politically, so when they are both seeing the same danger on the horizon, it behooves one to pay very close attention.

All the flavors of oppression

The Greatest "Science Fiction" Writer Ever explains why her work is such a joy to read:

“Each flavor of oppression tends to support others,” she said during a two-hour world-building workshop at the WIRED25 festival in San Francisco last weekend, where Jemisin coached the crowd in constructing secondary-world societies. “I’m most interested in character. However, character is informed by culture, and culture is informed by environment. In a lot of cases, to understand the character I need to understand literally everything about their world.” To do so, she applies two frameworks: one that focuses on macroworldbuilding (the creation of the physical environment in which the story will take place—planet, continents, climate, ecology, and culture) and one that focuses on microworldbuilding (the societies that result, in all their flavors of social stratification).

In the session, Jemisin unpacked the latter, explaining that one of the biggest pitfalls in world-building was that writers don’t approach it thoughtfully. “The screw-up is that people just don’t do it at all,” she said. “People go into creating a world that is not like ours with their embedded assumptions about how our world works still firmly in place. So they end up creating our world but with tentacle sharks.” She continued, “If you are going to go into this completely alien world still thinking like a modern 2019 American, then you’re not doing your job as a creator.”

Doing it right requires supreme attention to nuance. If you’re building a society from the top down—her recommendation—start with species (which she says is dictated by the macroworld’s ecology), then consider their morphology (“consistent physiological variations within a species, like lactose intolerance”), raciation, acculturation, power, and role.

It didn’t take long for Jemisin to get the audience involved. The inhabitants of their world, they collectively dreamed up, would be salmon-shark creatures with five tentacles on each fin living in a tempestuous channel on an Earth-like planet. (The stuff of nightmares, Jemisin noted.) Jemisin pressed them to consider physiology: “Are there some with different colorations? Are there some who prefer the top of the water versus the bottom of the water?” When one audience member suggested that some would have gills and others wouldn’t, Jemisin worked through the possible ramifications. “In this [water-based] society, if they are treating the people without gills as less important, that’s just straight-up genocide. My guess is that the power dynamics of the society are going to put no gills at the top, because you’ve got to have more resources for the people with gills.”

And yes, reading her work is EXACTLY as painful as this little vignette suggests.

...

Only more ellipses. A LOT more. The only thing Jemisin enjoys more than oppression is ellipses.

Nickles and the Big Bear

The debate everyone was calling for finally took place last night. It went about how one would have expected.

When the personal should be political

The Christian church is now almost entirely bereft of leadership:

Calling it “pronoun hospitality,” Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear revealed on an “Ask Me Anything” episode of his podcast that he prefers to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns.

Greear said that while there is room for disagreement and Christians should disagree charitably, he sees it as a hospitable courtesy to refer to transgender people by their chosen pronouns, despite knowing that their sex does not match their descriptors.

Actually, I have no problem with this at all on the personal level. It is simply polite to address people as they prefer to be addressed, especially when they are crazy. But to take this position as a leader is simply wrong and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the leader's duty to put himself and his personal preferences last, after the interests of the organization and his members.

Christianity has been betrayed by the Cult of Nice. And while niceties are an important aspect of civilization and correct etiquette is generally preferable to its absence, manners do not trump math, science, history, or DNA when it comes to speaking the truth about reality. The personal is not the political, which is why sometimes the latter should trump the former.

Chick-fil-A convergence confirmed

There is no longer any room for doubt. The cucking on the anti-LBGTPQ front is real and so is the first stage of the convergence of Chick-fil-A:

Chick-fil-A’s announcement that it was dumping the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which have come under attack by gay activist groups, caught Christian fans of the fast food chain by surprise. It shouldn’t have if they had been paying attention to CFA’s corporate structure.

The donations were coming out of the Chick-fil-A Foundation. The Executive Director of the CFA Foundation is Rodney D. Bullard, a former White House fellow and Assistant US Attorney. Some may have mistaken him for a conservative because he was a fellow in the Bush Administration, but he was an Obama donor, and, more recently, had donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign while at Chick-fil-A.

Like many corporations, Chick-fil-A branded its charitable giving as a form of social responsibility. Bullard became its Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility is a leftist endeavor to transform corporations into the political arms of radical causes. Like other formerly conservative corporations, Chick-fil-A had made the fundamental error of adopting the language and the infrastructure of its leftist peers. And that made what happened entirely inevitable.

In an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, Bullard emphasized that the Chick-fil-A Foundation had a "higher calling than any political or cultural war." The foundation boss was preparing the way for the shakeup that was coming in the fall. Even while he claimed that the CFA Foundation had a higher calling than a political or cultural war, he was preparing to accommodate the Left’s cultural war.

Bullard would have been seen as a safe bet. The CFA Foundation and the Christian groups it supported were so entangled that Bullard serves on the Salvation Army’s National Advisory Board and was on the National Board of Trustees of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. But Bullard’s vision was not that of charity, but of corporate social responsibility. And the two things are fundamentally different.

Charity helps people. Corporate social responsibility is virtue signaling by capitalists to anti-capitalists. Unlike charity, corporate social responsibility isn’t about helping people, but ticking off ideological and identity politics boxes like diversity and the environment. If people accidentally get helped in the process of helping a corporation signal its membership in the politically correct creed, that can’t be helped.

The Chick-fil-A Foundation will go on funding leftist groups like Atlanta's Westside Future Fund. The Westside Future Fund is a project of the Atlanta Committee for Progress together with former Mayor Kasim Reed. It will just opt out of funding Christian groups whose views offend anyone on the Left.... There was also a $10,000 donation to Saris to Suits whose mission is to "advance women's empowerment, education, gender equality, and social justice."

There’s money for social justice, but not for the Salvation Army.

There was $25,000 for UNICEF and $75,000 for the Andrew Young Foundation. That last one isn’t a surprise. Carter’s radical UN ambassador sits on the CFA Foundation’s advisory board. $20,000 went to the Latino Leaders Network, another $20,000 to the Harvard Debate Diversity Network, $45,000 to the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and $5,000 was allotted to Friends of Refugees.

Looks like I had better update Corporate Cancer sooner than planned. There is no excuse for any of this stuff. If Bullard isn't promptly fired, then the SJW cancer will rapidly metastasize throughout the corporation.

Mister Metokur deplatformed

Patreon just deplatformed Mister Metokur in what can only be described as an epic fuckup of proportions that have seldom hitherto been seen. So much so that Mister Metokur may not even know it yet.

If anyone has his email address, send it to me. And if you are he, get in touch! Because you're not going to believe this....

Mailvox: Apple and the debt bomb

Forget the good of society and the interests of the employees. The giant corporations aren't even acting in the interests of their shareholders anymore, if this emailer is to be believed.

I work for a company that was involved in [REDACTED]. It struck me as strange that a company with the cash pile that Apple has - just over $100bn in their last earnings release - would be issuing debt to raise even more cash, so I looked a little deeper and the below may be something relevant to your blog given some of your recent posts on financialisation...

When Steve Jobs died in 2011 Apple didn't have a single penny of debt, which was unique among Silicon Valley's tech giants. That lasted not a full 2 years after his death because in April 2013 Apple conducted the largest non-bank bond issuance in history, raising $17bn in debt (as an aside, Goldman Sachs led the bond issue). The justification for this would likely seem counter-intuitive to those outside finance: Jobs' successor Tim Cook was supposedly under pressure from investors to return some of its cash to shareholders, which meant a program of buying back shares and paying out higher dividends. However, a large portion of Apple's then $200bn cash pile was held outside the US and if repatriated would face a 35% tax charge, so it made 'financial sense' to keep the cash abroad and raise debt in the US at interest rates of c.3% instead to fund this gigantic shareholder return program. Paying out a 3% charge on cash instead of 35% sounds good, right? Apple certainly thought so, as they continued to issue debt over the next few years.

As we know, Trump's signature piece of legislation so far is his tax cuts bill. It slashed the rate of corporation tax payable on foreign-held cash reserves when repatriated. Interestingly, Apple duly began repatriating some of its cash held abroad in 2017. So presumably it then stopped raising more debt? Nope. Throughout 2017 and 2018 Apple issued more and more debt to fund payouts to its equity investors. This brings me back to this month's 'Green Bond' issue - the largest of its kind in Europe. Putting aside the virtue signalling aspect of issuing a 'Green' bond (the idea is that it's used to fund initiatives designed to reduce Apple's carbon footprint), it appears that Apple has become addicted to debt. In short, just 8 years on from Steve Jobs' death when they were entirely debt-free, Apple now owes around $106bn in debt and pays out around $3.5bn annually in interest payments alone.

There is literally no business case for Apple to be taking on such debt. It is simply sucking cash out of the company. It does not need to raise cash to invest in R&D, hire new staff or expand its business. If you read through the FT, Forbes etc., the best explanations are that "debt right now is cheap, so they may as well raise cash this way to pay shareholders". Apple themselves state the reason for issuing debt is for "corporate reasons" according to their Italian CFO, i.e. nothing related to creating productive value for the firm. They now hold slightly more debt than cash - a remarkable turnaround for a company that was once debt-free and held over $200bn in cash at its peak. Even more alarmingly, Apple has issued releases saying that they intend to become a "cash neutral" company, i.e. it will pay out any excess cash to shareholders and debt holders, and given Apple's ever-increasing debt pile it therefore looks as though the lenders will be milking the firm for years to come. The debt vampires have well and truly sunk their teeth into Apple.

There are plenty of arguments one can make on this, but one wonders whether any of this would have happened if Steve Jobs was still alive and running the company.

It's like reading about Wakanda

They're just so advanced! Seriously, though, who reads about the convoluted maze that is Israeli politics and then concludes, "you know, the USA would just be so much better if only it had super-smart people like that running the media, the courts, and the financial system?"

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced Thursday, prolonging the country’s political uncertainty as it looks set to head into its third national election in a year.

Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of a "witch hunt" and "political coup," faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of bribery and a maximum 3-year term for fraud and breach of trust, according to legal experts.

The Israeli inability to form a stable government does certainly tend to confirm the DNA studies that indicate their Italian ancestry.

Why we do what we do

A supporter of the Junior Classics 2020 edition observes 60's-era convergence:

My father in law recently gave us a 1962 edition of the Junior Classics that was sitting around his house. All female editors with a corresponding convergence in the stories included therein. Still some good stuff by today's standards, but the rot was well established by then.

I've never seen that edition, having grown up on the 1958 edition, but I'm not even remotely surprised. Preserving knowledge, teaching children, and taking back cultural ground. The objective is right there in the name.

Speaking of the intellectual offensive, if you emailed about your interest in the Castalia Deluxe subscription but haven't signed up yet, this is the time to do so. I don't know if we're going to close subscription sign-ups for the even months or add a sign-up fee during those months, but regardless, we want to pass 50 percent before we place the initial order with the bindery. Right now, we're at 32 percent, which isn't at all bad for the first 18 hours, but we can certainly do better.

Ditching Fitbit

I wouldn't wear a Fitbit regularly anymore now that Google has purchased them. And I certainly wouldn't have an account tied to it recording my data:

When Mike Carpenter learned Google’s latest acquisition would be Fitbit, the maker of a device he wore at all hours of the day except in the shower, he left his Fitbit Charge 3 on the table at his office where he was working that day. He, and others like him, haven’t picked it up since.

On Nov. 1, Google said would be buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion in hopes of boosting its hardware business getting a foothold in the health space. Google explicitly said in the announcing the deal that it won’t sell users' personal or health data. Despite that assurance, some Fitbit users say they don’t trust the company, and are shedding the product altogether.

“I’m not only afraid of what they can do with the data currently, but what they can do with it once their AI advances in 10 or 20 years,” Carpenter told CNBC, saying he didn’t believe the company’s privacy assurances. “Health insurance companies would love to get their hands on that data and their purposes wouldn’t be advertising so is that what they are going to do with it? They didn’t spend the money to not utilize it in some way.”

The trend of people throwing or threatening to throw out their Fitbit devices comes as Google faces a perception problem that has spanned everyday users and regulators alike. The company has paid data privacy fines in the EU and made recent strides into the stringently regulated healthcare industry, which has caused the public to re-think seemingly harmless tools.

“I only recently got it and now I’m thinking I don’t need Google watching literally my every step or my every heartbeat,” said Dan Kleinman, who said he is getting rid of his Fitbit Versa.

Any benefit of knowing that information is significantly outweighed by the disadvantage of Google also having it

Why won't you move?

Economists are upset that Americans aren't uprooting themselves from their communities as readily as the Baby Boomers and preceding generations did:

Mobility in the United States has fallen to record lows. In 1985, nearly 20 percent of Americans had changed their residence within the preceding 12 months, but by 2018, fewer than ten percent had. That’s the lowest level since 1948, when the Census Bureau first started tracking mobility.

The decline in Americans’ mobility has been staggering, as the chart below shows. Mobility rates have fallen for nearly every group, across age, gender, income, homeownership status, and marital status.

Declining mobility contributes to a host of economic and social issues: less economic dynamism, lower rates of innovation, and lower productivity. By locking people into place, it exacerbates inequality by limiting the economic opportunities for workers.

A wide range of explanations have been offered to account for these substantial declines in mobility. Many consider the culprit to be the economic crisis, which locked people into declining-value homes; others attribute it to the huge differential in the housing prices in expensive cities. Some economists contend that job opportunities have become similar across places, meaning people are less likely to move for work; others see rising student debt as a key factor that has kept young Americans in their parents’ basements.

Now, a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that other, more emotional and psychological factors may be at work. The study uses data from the bank’s Survey of Consumer Expectations to examine the degree to which people’s attachment to their communities affects their willingness and ability to move. To get at this, they use data from the survey (which covers a monthly panel of 1,300 respondents and is nationally representative) to group Americans into the three mobility classes I identified in my book Who’s Your City: “the mobile” who have the means, education, and capability to move to spaces of opportunity; “the stuck” who lack the resources to relocate; and “the rooted” who have the resources to move, but prefer to stay where they are.

The survey identifies respondents’ most recent move, their probability of moving in the next two years, and other data related to moving including job opportunities and income prospects, housing costs, the distance from current home, costs of moving to various locations, crime rates, taxes, community values and norms, and proximity to family and friends. The researchers use these data to estimate the overall costs—what they call the “willingness to pay” or WTP—for people to move different locations. They then use statistical models to examine the importance of these psychological factors compared to other mostly financial explanations.

A significant reason for the decline in mobility is that many of us are highly attached to our towns. Nearly half of those in the survey (47 percent) identify as rooted. The rooted are disproportionately white, older, married, homeowners, and rural. Their reasons for not moving are more psychological than economic: proximity to family and friends, and their involvement in the local community or church.

Note the significance of the "disproportionately white" aspect of the so-called "rooted". In the 1950s and 1960s, even in the 1980s, all those Midwesterners who moved to California were moving, or so they assumed, to another white state. My parents moved from Massachusetts to Minnesota in the 1970s, then my parents' best friends moved from Minnesota to California in the 1980s. Both moves were textbooks moves made for purely economic reasons.

Would the latter move be made today? Almost certainly not.

Now keep in mind that the entire purpose of free trade's supposed economic benefits is to expand this labor mobility worldwide. The only price is the complete destruction of everything you know and love, including your relationships with your friends and family. So, it's good that the US labor mobility rate is falling, the real problem is that it can't fall fast enough to prevent the country from collapsing or preserve the remaining unity of the least-invaded states.

Fired from royalty?

I didn't even know that stepping down was an option. What does that even mean?

Prince Andrew was forced to quit royal duties last night after a dramatic intervention by the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They took decisive action to contain the fall-out from the duke's disastrous TV interview about his friendship with a paedophile billionaire.

The interview triggered days of catastrophic headlines and caused a string of businesses and charities to desert him.

Following lengthy discussions with Charles, who is touring New Zealand, the Queen summoned Andrew to Buckingham Palace and told him to step down.

That's fine and all, but now tell him to fly to the USA and be interviewed by the FBI. (reads royal statement) Ah, "for the foreseeable future". In other words, it's just a PR stunt until everything blows over, or so they hope.

Announcing Castalia Deluxe

The much-anticipated monthly subscription to join the Castalia Deluxe Book Club and receive a deluxe leather-bound book published by Castalia House every other month is now available.

• Genuine leather bindings
• Gilded cover and spine titling
• Gilded page edges
• Archival-quality paper
• First-rate fiction
• Timeless classics of history, science, and philosophy

The first Deluxe Book Club book is the Deluxe edition of The Missionaries by Owen Stanley. And for the seriously hard-core book collector who has all the Franklin Signed First Editions, it's also possible to sign up for the limited-edition Library subscription.

Just to be clear, Castalia Deluxe is the main product and the Deluxe editions are the focus of this project. The Library editions are an ancillary experiment we're doing at the request of some very serious book collectors, and which the Deluxe editions make possible. In quality terms, we are targeting the late '80s Franklin Library editions for our Deluxe editions, albeit with better cover designs.

Canada's veterans celebrate the Revolution

There are so many New Canadians that they have their own veteran's associations now.

Dressed in the uniform of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the 40 or so singers stood proudly in neat rows and belted out an old favourite.

I am a Soldier talks of defeating the Japanese, vanquishing Nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek in the Communist revolution and being tested by the revolutionary war. The performance “brought forth a whirlwind of Chinese military spirit in a foreign land,” said a report on the concert.

The recital earlier this month at the Centre for the Performing Arts in Richmond Hill, Ont., was not offered by a visiting martial choir from Beijing.

It was the work of a surprising new Canadian association, dedicated to retired troops of the China’s People’s Liberation Army or PLA — China’s armed forces — who are now settled in this country.

Interesting that we don't often hear how "Canada is fallen" even though it is a tossup between Canada and Australia concerning which will be the first to follow South Africa into the "formerly First World" category.

Antitrust intensifies

There is a stronger case for breaking up Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon than there was for breaking up Standard Oil:

Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft all easily have more than 10 times the net income as did Standard Oil when it was broken apart. Apple coming in at close to 50 times the net income! Cisco and Intel come in just under 10 times the net income as compared to Standard Oil, both at 9.9 times greater net income than Standard Oil when it was broken apart.

If 91 percent control of the oil refining industry and net income of $35 million per year was enough to break apart Standard Oil under the terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act, there are a few tech super giants that would face a similar fate if the trust-busting philosophies that held sway during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt were en vogue today.

In January, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon. The article reports that these major tech firms each have greater control over certain high tech industry sectors than Standard Oil had over oil production during its heyday. For example, 95 percent of young adults using the Internet subscribe to a Facebook product, whether it’s the company’s flagship social network or other services like Instagram or WhatsApp. Google controls 89 percent of Internet searches.

Where monopolies don’t exist, duopolies certainly do; Google and Apple, for example, collectively hold 99 percent of the mobile operating software market.

If the percentage of market share for important tech sectors held by these titans wasn’t enough, the massive fortunes these companies continue to generate would seem likely to trigger at least some antitrust scrutiny. Remember, Standard Oil’s annual net earnings through 1906 earned what today would be $969 million each year in 2017 dollars, adjusted for inflation. To some of the tech super giants of today, $1 billion in profits is nothing more than pocket change.

What is holding Republicans back? This is an absolute no-brainer as well as a certain vote winner across the political spectrum?

Self-reliance is a military virtue

Sanctions and U.S. military assistance are threatening to change the balance of power in the Middle East. Just not in the way they were intended to do so:

Despite decades of sanctions, Iran has succeeded in developing its missile arsenal, which is larger than that of any other Middle Eastern country including Israel, a Pentagon study said Tuesday.

"Iran has an extensive missile development program, and the size and sophistication of its missile force continues to grow despite decades of counterproliferation efforts aimed at curbing its advancement," the Defense Intelligence Agency said.

"Lacking a modern air force, Iran has embraced ballistic missiles as a long-range strike capability to dissuade its adversaries in the region -- particularly the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia -- from attacking Iran," the report said.

Iran has "the largest missile force in the Middle East," the report said. A US intelligence official said on condition of anonymity that the assessment included Israel.

Not unlike the German development of the U-boat and the Japanese development of the aircraft carrier due to overwhelming British and American battleship strength, the Iranian bypassing of the aircraft-based air superiority doctrine is likely to have helped it strategically in the end.

And due to its inability to purchase weapons from the US or the European countries, it now has a base of missile technology that cannot be cut off at will by those countries.

A vice too far

Even evil corporations that proudly fly the rainbow flag are unwilling to get behind the P in LGBTP:

Prince Andrew's supporters are in retreat today as yet another multi-million pound business cut ties with the pet charity project he plugged repeatedly in his BBC car crash interview.... KPMG, one of London's big four accounting firms, was the first to admit it was protecting its reputation by ending its £100,000 a year sponsorship.

Insurance giant Aon asked for its name be removed from the scheme's website and drugs maker AstraZeneca said it was reviewing its relationship.

Children's charities and schools linked to Prince Andrew are also in disarray today as they distanced themselves from the under-fire royal.

A string of major companies and charities are also examining their links with Andrew after his extraordinary TV interview on Saturday.

The Outward Bound Trust, which has the prince's daughter Beatrice as a trustee, is holding a special meeting this week to discuss the issue.

Children North East and The Children's Foundation, both charities Andrew lists on his official website, refused to tell MailOnline if he will keep his official role supporting them in light of the Epstein scandal.

Now, I'm certainly willing to give Chick-Fil-A the benefit of the doubt regarding its recent marketing missteps. But I suspect that even its most die-hard supporters will admit that convergence has taken root inside the Christian restaurant chain  if it starts featuring Prince Andrew in its advertising.

Mailvox: Converging the Mustang

American automotive buffs are not happy with Ford permitting its new electric vehicle to wear the Mustang brand as a skinsuit:

Recently Ford revealed a new all-electric 4-door crossover SUV. Then labeled it a Mustang Mach E. There is a 50min video of the reveal on YouTube. In the comment section people are seeing the complete inversion of an iconic car brand and they're not happy about it.

Based on the diversity hires shown from the design team, I'm not surprised they have no understanding of the Mustang brand.

I look forward to reading Corporate Cancer soon.

Although I'm not an American muscle car guy, I can sympathize. I wasn't happy when Ford acquired and trashed the Jaguar brand either. But seriously, diversity or not, how hard is it to grasp that a Mustang is a sports car, not A 4-DOOR UTILITY VEHICLE?

Speaking of Corporate Cancer, the paperback is now available at Amazon and at a discount at Castalia Direct.

It may interest readers to know some of my predictions in the book are already coming to pass, such as the continued targeting of the Internet giants by national tax authorities.

The Czech government approved a seven percent digital tax proposal on Monday aimed at boosting state coffers by taxing advertising by global internet giants like Google and Facebook, the finance ministry said. The tax would apply to companies with global revenue over €750 million ($826.5 million) annually, 100 million crown ($4.32 million) turnover in the Czech market and a reach exceeding 200,000 user accounts.

Tax cuts are terrible incentives

A straightforward industrial policy would be vastly preferable to abstract arguments with no means of holding corporations accountable for their failure to follow through on the theory:

In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard.

The public face of its lobbying effort, which included a tax proposal of its own, was FedEx’s founder and chief executive, Frederick Smith, who repeatedly took to the airwaves to champion the power of tax cuts. “If you make the United States a better place to invest, there is no question in my mind that we would see a renaissance of capital investment,” he said on an August 2017 radio show hosted by Larry Kudlow, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council.

Four months later, President Donald Trump signed into law the $1.5 trillion tax cut that became his signature legislative achievement. FedEx reaped big savings, bringing its effective tax rate to less than zero in fiscal year 2018 from 34% in fiscal year 2017, meaning that, overall, the government technically owed it money. But it did not increase investment in new equipment and other assets in the fiscal year that followed as Smith said businesses like his would.

Nearly two years after the tax law passed, the windfall to corporations like FedEx is becoming clear. A New York Times analysis of data compiled by Capital IQ shows no statistically meaningful relationship between the size of the tax cut that companies and industries received and the investments they made. If anything, the companies that received the biggest tax cuts increased their capital investment by less, on average, than companies that got smaller cuts.

From free trade to immigration to corporate tax cuts, the more one examines economic theories in practice, the more obviously false one observes them to be.

Corporate Cancer audiobook

The audiobook+ for Corporate Cancer is now available at Arkhaven Comics for $14.99. Narrated by Bob Allen, the audiobook+ includes the ebook in both Epub and Kindle formats and is 4 hours and 51 minutes long.

Supporters of the Replatforming should check their emails, as you will receive a coupon for a free download that is valid until December 2nd. Be sure to download your ebooks and audiobooks before then!

The paperback will be shipping to Heroes of the Resistance next week. The audiobook will also be available on Audible in the next two weeks or so.

UPDATE: If you were having initial trouble with the Patreon code, try again. It should work now.

UPDATE: David Stewart reviews Corporate Cancer on his YouTube channel:

Chick-Fil-A cucks

The chicken restaurant takes its first big step toward corporate convergence:

Chick-Fil-A said on Monday that it has stopped funding two Christian charities after coming under fire in recent weeks from LGBTQ activists. The fast-food chain’s foundation has donated millions of dollars to The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Both organizations have a history of opposing same-sex marriage.

Chick-fil-A said it no longer funds the organizations.

“We made multi-year commitments to both organisations and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018,” a spokeswoman for Chick-fil-A told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding the company would focus its giving on “education, homelessness and hunger.”

When reached by CNBC, the company declined to comment further.

The Atlanta-based company has faced criticism in the past for its charitable donations and CEO Dan Cathy’s public comments opposing gay marriage. As Chick-fil-A expands outside of its stronghold in the southeastern U.S., activists have put pressure on the company.

This echoes the convergence of NASCAR. Forsaking the existing audience in favor of chasing one that they will never find.

The prince's pizza party

Prince Andrew's televised interview has been widely seen as an unmitigated disaster, but the prince nevertheless considered it to have been a complete success:

The Duke of York attempted to 'set the record straight' by speaking about the sex allegations against him during a sit-down with Maitlis at Buckingham Palace. He completely refuted any wrongdoing in the interview but he was widely condemned for showing a lack of remorse over his friendship with Epstein. Despite many calling his performance a 'PR disaster', the prince is thought to have spoken to the Queen at a church service on Sunday, describing the interview as a 'great success'.

How to rectify the two positions? I suspect both perspectives are correct. While it was obviously a PR disaster, Prince Andrew doesn't give a damn about what the public thinks. It appears that what the prince was doing was akin to Kevin Spacey's weird, but successful warning that if he was abandoned to be held accountable for his crimes, he would spill everything about everyone else.

I very much doubt it is a strange coincidence that Prince Andrew said he was at a children's pizza party rather than at a club he was known to frequent. My interpretation of this weirdly specific detail is that he was warning his fellow evildoers that if they don't get him out of his present predicament, he'll tell the legal authorities in the UK and in the USA everything about their crimes against children.

Everyone has figured out Shapiru now

Even those who are not - to the best of my knowledge - Christians now understand the intrinsic falsehood of Shapiru, Prager, Crenshaw, and other neoclowns attempting to sell the "Judeo-Christian" lie and how they are attempting to redefine and undermine Western civilization:

Shapiro is probably the smartest of the con-men deployed by Conservative Inc., but he is also the most thin-skinned. Any push-back is met with a childish tantrum. Like Charlie Kirk, it suggests he is a hothouse flower, carefully protected by his handlers, in order to maintain the charade.

If you pay attention to his act, what comes through is he has a deep, subconscious hatred of white people. Take for example his promotion of the dubious claim that European civilization is defined by Judeo-Christian tradition. For most of Western history, Christianity and Judaism were at odds. In the early medieval period, Jews and Christians competed for converts. When the term Judeo-Christian came into use in the 17th and 18th century, it was as a Pauline pejorative against Catholicism.

Putting aside the history, what he is doing is rewriting the European past in order to make it dependent on his religious and ethnic traditions. You can have your Christianity, as long as it is accepting of Jews, which neuters the theologically. You can also have your Western chauvinism, as long as you make sure Jews are central characters in the narrative. Ben Shapiro’s view of Western civilization is colonial, as if he is allowing white people to have some conditional cultural heritage.

This becomes clear when Shapiro says “white civilization is nonsensical.” He says that “civilization is defined by culture, history and philosophy.” He is divorcing what he calls Western civilization from the people who created it. Like his sleight of hand swapping out Catholicism from the heart of European history, he is turning Western civilization into a gift inexplicably granted to the people of Europe. It is not something European people created, but something they received, like hitting the lottery.

There is an obvious implication to this train of thought. If white people are just lucky recipients of civilization, then they are not really deserving of it.

Reject the lies and those who push them. The lie is the loose thread that, when pulled, eventually reveals the inversive evil underneath.

Pure inversion

Gay Republican Pirate edition:

Dan Crenshaw@DanCrenshawTX
In 2020, remember this:

Republicans are the party of Uber.

Democrats are the party of taxi cab unions.

Own your own labor, work where you want and how you want, and embrace innovation. That’s conservatism.

So to conserve is to change? Allowing millions of foreigners to invade, to work where they want and to work how they want is conserving the nation and the society? This is 100-percent inversion. And where you see inversion, you can be certain there is pure sulfur underlying it.

UPDATE: Speaking of inversion, a neoclown is now selling tolerant liberal conservatism.

Eric Weinstein@EricRWeinstein
Don’t get sold the narrative that Trump now owns ALL US Conservatism. He does own a good chunk of it. But there‘s also a new strain of tolerant conservatism that‘s very liberal: relentlessly civil, anti-inequality, pro-logic, pro-gay, pro-weed, pro-free speech & multicultural.

President Trump doesn't own conservatism. Conservatism is dead. And America will eventually be much the better for its passing.

NFL Week 11

Discuss amongst yourselves

The impeccable logic of transracism

If men can identify as women, there is no rational reason to deny those of one race the ability to identify as the member of another race. In fact, the transracial case is stronger, given that racial labels are, unlike sex chromosomes, genuinely social constructs. Godfrey Elfwick was right all along. #Wrongskin

Anyone should be allowed to ‘identify’ as black regardless of the colour of their skin or background, according to Left-wing university leaders.

The Universities and Colleges Union has set out its stance in a report on the ongoing row about whether men should be able to self-identify as women and be treated as female regardless of their anatomy.

The UCU’s ‘position statement’ did not just stand by its support for self-identification of gender, but also insisted people can choose their own race, saying: ‘Our rules commit us to ending all forms of discrimination, bigotry and stereotyping. UCU has a long history of enabling members to self-identify whether that is being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women.’ 

Denying one's ability to racially self-identify is inarguably transphobic and if we've learned one thing in the last year, it is that transphobia trumps both sexism and racism. And the very worst transphobia is transracism.

On Comics: Bane is Dead!

The Legend Chuck Dixon is back with two new Unauthorized videos, one for subscribers and one for everyone. Note that Blue is for subscribers-only and Red is free for everyone.

The Devil Mouse molests children

The Vice-President of Operations at Disney and two lesser employees were recently arrested and/or convicted of abusing children as young as seven.

A former Disney executive has been convicted of sexually abusing a 7-year-old girl. The Oregonian/OregonLive reports 73-year-old Michael Laney was convicted Tuesday of four counts of first-degree sexual abuse after a six-day trial.

Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Benjamin Souede acquitted Laney of three counts of rape and three counts of sex abuse.

Court documents say Laney began abusing the victim in 2009 and there were multiple incidents of abuse spanning about two years.

The child initially reported the abuse in 2017 in Washington, where she lived at the time.

Another person reported that Laney had sexually abused her in 2007 when she lived in Portland, but the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said the court couldn’t find sufficient evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

The very few reports that are out there describe Laney in generic terms as "a former Disney executive". He was a little bit more than that, according to his resume:

• Senior Vice-President: Warner Bros. Feature Animation

• Vice-President of Operations: Walt Disney Feature Animation 

Michael Laney has over thirty-five years of senior level executive management experience as President, Chief Operating Officer or Chief Financial Officer for divisions of Fortune 50 companies as well as smaller, privately owned for-profit companies and not-for-profit organizations. During the last four years, Michael has split his time between Portland and Los Angeles serving the non-profit sector providing CFO and consulting services for four non-profit organizations as well as being on two for-profit advisory boards and one governmental entity.

Notice how these sex criminals preying upon children are always reported as "former Disney employees" even when they were clearly working for Disney at the time they committed their crimes. The moral corruption is active on all levels; from top to bottom, Disney is one of the most evil corporations on the planet. It goes well beyond the usual social justice convergence. You should not even consider supporting its new streaming service in any way, shape, or form.